Yahoo! did but they also had BSD developers on the payroll.
Any Silicon Valley company will pay enough but that is why when you leave Silicon Valley or a big tech hub everything is windows. The pay attracts the talent.
You said the reason people don't use BSD was because the people who work on it are were too expensive. I know Google don't use BSD, but your idea that it's because they couldn't afford to pay BSD developers doesn't seem to add up, since Google happily pays Linux kernel developers maybe half a million dollars or more. Are the BSD developers really paid so much that Google can't afford them over the Linux developers? That doesn't seem likely to me. I think the reason they're not using BSD is something other than what you're suggesting.
when I said "Work on the systems" I meant support maintain care and feed.
Linux has become mainstream so there are more people in the talent pool to pay to support it.
Windows ... has more so it is cheaper
BSD simply doesn't have enough people who know the system well enough to support it
Paying 5 developers to build something cool doesn't mean you have the support system to run it.... You actually need people who understand your product to use it as a business system
there's only slightly more learning curve between Linux Distro X vs BSD Y as there is between Linux Distro X and Linux Distro Y.
In some ways & depending on the situation, moreso, since linux distros are often trying to do things drastically different from each other in order to differentiate themselves, whereas BSD's are often sharing code because of the small developer base, sharing-compatible license, and lack of bottom-line oriented corporate sponsorship.
Having worked in the industry for a couple decades and been interviewing people for the last decade I can tell you the number of people who understand low level systems management is not high.
Used to be a system admin could modify a kernel module in linux. These days its getting hard to find one who can use the CLI properly
Yahoo! did but they also had BSD developers on the payroll.
Any Silicon Valley company will pay enough but that is why when you leave Silicon Valley or a big tech hub everything is windows. The pay attracts the talent.